


The Others

by kindkit



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Cultural Differences, Exile, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-16 23:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mistakes, the Big Guy would later say, were made. These are the mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Others

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the History Battle on the LJ community sfa_history. I wrote this in response to my own prompt ("Bigfoot sightings") because apparently I'm that kind of person. I messed around with timelines a bit, moving the late-fifties outbreak of Bigfoot sightings forward about ten years to make it compatible with the Big Guy coming to the Sanctuary in 1951. Considering what the show itself does with history, I feel entirely justified.

"Why don't you stop?" the Grandmother asked him once, not long before the people decided to send him away. "Just leave them alone. They're nothing to do with us."

"I don't know," he said. Later, when he'd learned English, he found understanding in a word: curiosity. His own language had a word for paying-close-attention, which the people used to talk about spearfishing, gathering berries, minding little ones. It had a word for spending-time-on-unimportant-things, used when children lay on the grass watching birds fly or adolescents showed off their strength to each other. Neither was an answer to the Grandmother's question.

He should have been more careful and stayed farther back. They weren't as stupidly inattentive to what was around them as the people said they were, this new tribe of others with their stinking _things_ that tore down the trees and put up houses. They noticed the footprints he was too foolish to smooth out. Sometimes they caught a glimpse of him, and shouted, and then sometimes they went away in fear, but more always came back later. Looking for him, and for the people.

Leaving the others alone should have been easy. They were too much like people to hunt and eat. Too dangerous as well. And they were sickly-looking, small and hairless; he didn't want to have sex with them. They were as irrelevant as foxes. But he liked the sharp jabbering sounds of their language, and their tools that could do things he'd never imagined. They were so _strange_. They covered themselves up and made it hard to tell female from male. Some of them were so lazy that they didn't walk anywhere, but were carried by shiny dead-alive monsters. A few went on lonely journeys through the forest for no reason that he could understand. And like children--like him, though he wasn't a child--they spent time on unimportant things. They liked to sit idly on riverbanks, not even fishing, and to watch the sky when it turned red before night. They talked and talked and talked. They even had sex out of season. He once saw a pair of them sexing, right in the open like animals. It shocked him so much that he broke a branch underfoot as he turned away, but they were too busy to notice.

After that he stayed at home for a long time, and the Grandmother thought he was well again. But his unquiet, his curiosity, flared up like a fever. He went back to his watching. And he was seen, and seen again, and the people had to hide far up in the mountains to keep clear of the searching others.

Before the people drove him away, the Grandmother took his name token from his spirit bag and burned it. He was not of the people, and he had no name. Let him find a name with the others if he could. Or let him be no one, a homeless wandering stranger, as he had made himself.


End file.
